Opinion
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The photo of the University of Regina's cheer team dressed up for a theme night on Thursday, March 13, 2014, was tweeted out by people offended by the Cowboys and Indians theme. The school has apologized. (Photo: Twitter/QMI Agency)

Every age has its officious moralizers, people who try to assert their superiority by embracing the prevailing orthodoxy—whatever it happens to be—with exaggerated zeal. They want to feel righteous. So they hunt for transgressors at whom they can point an accusatory finger.

In the post-Christian West, the holier-than-thou types enforce the codes of political correctness. The proverbial witch whom these p-c Puritans long to prosecute is the white racist, who (in their minds) lurks around every corner. And since they believe the act of accusing others bestows virtue on the accuser, they cry "racism!" whenever they find a pretext for doing so.

They recently worked themselves into a lather of self-righteousindignation when they found out that the University of Regina cheerteam, which happened to be all white, dressed up ascowboys and Indians for a costume party.

The outrage! The girls must be punished for their "racism," theTwitter mob demanded. The dean of kinesiology promptly ensuredeveryone that the team would be subjected to "cultural sensitivitytraining."

Now I'm not saying this is equivalent to "burn-the-witch!" hysteria.But the difference is only one of degree.

Though the p-c crowd claims to have a monopoly on tolerance, they areactually intense haters. For one thing, they hate Canada, becausethey've convinced themselves it's a cesspool of racism.

As Holly Ann McKenzie, a UBC student who calls herself a "whitesettler," wrote in an article on the CBC website: In "white-settlerculture" racism is so "normalized" that we white people don't evenrealize we're racist. "I believe that the U of R Cheer Team did not intend to disrespect anyone," she writes.

"Stereotypes of Indigenouspeople and a frontier narrative of white-settler 'progress' are partof our liberal ideology," and the cheer team, whether they realized itor not, "performed" stereotypes that "undermine indigenous people'sright to land, to services, to respect."

One could point out that theyalso "performed" stereotypes of cowboys. But the response would bethat cowboys were the beneficiaries of "white privilege." Natives, onthe other hand, are victims, and the cheerleaders' costumes mocked apainful episode in their history.

But that is a demeaning way to view Aboriginals; it assumes they’re such fragile souls that they need to be treated with kid gloves.

Moreover, McKenzie's repetitive use of "white-settler" istelling. As I read through the full version of her article (posted onher blog), the phrase came to evoke the image of an odious whitebigot, stalking menacingly in overalls and chewing on a piece ofstraw.

Unsurprisingly, she cites a book called "The colour ofdemocracy: Racism in Canadian Society"—part of an academic industrydevoted to portraying western culture as uniquely intolerant and whitepeople as almost inherently racist.

There's marked vengefulness in this kind of thinking. Themulticulturalist platitude goes like this: Europeans in the past had colonies and aboriginal peoples lost theirculture. Now, as retribution, westerners are supposed to disavow theirown culture and "accept and respect" other cultures instead.

But countless non-European cultures have had empires. Why doesn’t the p-c crowd demand the same punishment for them?

Further, howmany generations must be punished for the sins of their fathers? Ifyou read the academic literature, you'll see that it is meant tocontinue until western culture is annihilated.

That would be a pity, because the core idea of common-law cultures hasalways been this: People should be treated as individuals, not as members of groups. It’s a much more enlightened creed than the intolerant, race-obsessed fashion of political correctness.